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Genocide is one of the most serious problems confronting humanity. It has produced extreme suffering, hundreds of millions of deaths, and the catastrophic shattering of families, communities, and cultures. While genocidal violence has a long history, dating from the Roman destruction of Carthage to ancient Assyria and beyond, the term “genocide” was coined as recently as the early 1940s by Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who spearheaded an international campaign to criminalize the destruction of human collectivities. This effort successfully delivered the 1948 United Nations...

Genocide is one of the most serious problems confronting humanity. It has produced extreme suffering, hundreds of millions of deaths, and the catastrophic shattering of families, communities, and cultures. While genocidal violence has a long history, dating from the Roman destruction of Carthage to ancient Assyria and beyond, the term “genocide” was coined as recently as the early 1940s by Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who spearheaded an international campaign to criminalize the destruction of human collectivities. This effort successfully delivered the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Mostly stagnated by the onset of the Cold War, the field of genocide studies did not begin to mature until the early 1980s. Its growth was catalyzed further in the 1990s and the early 2000s by the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur. Having developed vigorously in the late 2000s, the constitution of the field now demands critical reflection. This bibliography surveys the field’s broad literature, with a particular focus on the concept of genocide, the genocidal process, and key issues in genocide studies.